Several organisations working for land rights of Dalits and tribals have joined hands and declared a movement to resolve the issue. The organisations have collected details of over 2.5 lakh landless Dalits and tribals, who are entitled to have one.
We have carried out the land rights movement in 26 districts and 74 talukas and identified 70,000 new applicants who are yet to get land and over 1.82 lakh people whose application for land are pending, said Gova Rathod of Jameen Adhikar Zumbesh.
He said hardly 10% of Dalits in the state would have land in their name. "Among the demands is also one where Dalit communities are seeking land for cremation. Dalits have a separate cremation ground in 90% of villages. But since this is not identified as a cremation ground, it often gets encroached and sometimes they are not allowed to cremate there. They are also not allowed to cremate the dead in the common cremation ground," said Rathod.
He said the movement will also ensure that Dalits who are not allowed to use ...

The members of several social organisations, including a students' body, today opposed the idea of granting citizenship to migrants during a meeting with the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the Citizenship
(Amendment) Bill, 2016, at the State Convention Hall here.
The Bill has been introduced in the Lok Sabha with an aim to provide citizenships to persecuted minorities from the neighbouring countries after at least six years of their residence in India.
The North East Students Organisation (NESO), in a petition to the committee, said the people of the region should be provided with "constitutional safeguards".
"We oppose the proposed Bill in totality and demand that Inner Line Permit system be introduced for the entire region," NESO chairman Samuel B Jyrwa said.
"The Bill is another effort to encourage infiltration of the Hindus from Bangladesh into the different states of the region. People here are shocked to see that religion is a criterion in the bill," he said.
In all, 10

Two days after disrupting survey works for the upcoming Bullet Train project in Thane, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) and local tribals on Wednesday carried out protests against the fortnight-long land survey initiated here on Wednesday, an activist said.